With development of the mobile Internet and popularization of smart terminals, data traffic grows rapidly. With advantages of a high rate and low costs, a wireless local area network (WLAN) becomes one of the mainstream mobile broadband access technologies.
To significantly improve a service transmission rate of a WLAN system, in the next-generation Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11ax standard, on the basis of an existing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology, an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technology is further used. In the OFDMA technology, a time-frequency resource of an air interface radio channel is divided into multiple orthogonal time-frequency resource blocks (RB, Resource Block); the RBs may be shared in a time domain, and may be orthogonal in a frequency domain.
In an existing WiFi system (for example, 11n or 11ac), a terminal still performs channel access by using a contention manner of carrier sense with collision avoidance. When a quantity of users increases, because channel access collisions increase, a system average throughput drops rapidly. In current work of a new WiFi standard (11ax), it is already decided to introduce an OFDMA technology in a WiFi system, to achieve an objective of improving a system average throughput in a high-density scenario. As an important part used for channel estimation in the existing WiFi system, an LTF also continues to be used in an OFDMA mode in the new WiFi standard. Therefore, in the OFDMA mode, a manner of generating an LTF becomes a research focus.
In the prior art, an 80-MHz LTF or a 160-MHz LTF in the 802.11ac standard is used as a basic template, from which values in a carrier part corresponding to a resource block scheduled by a user in an OFDMA mode are extracted, and values in a carrier part that does not correspond to the resource block are padded with 0s, so as to generate an LTF used by the user in the OFDMA mode. However, when a method in the prior art is used, a peak to average power ratio (PAPR) is relatively high.